What game solves this issue?

What game solves this issue?

Thief.

/thread

Dark Souls 2
While enemies had higher health they also change the enemy compositions and some had new attacks.

There is literally nothing wrong with this.

More enemy health means you need to be better offense and more enemy damage means better defense.

Fighting games.

Play Oblivion on a maxed out difficulty slider and you'll realize just how bad this type of game design is.

how?

How is increasing health and damage not a valid difficulty scaling method?

higher health means longer fights, player must perform well more consistently

higher damage means player is punished more for mistakes

longer fights and bigger punishment for getting hit means that the player may be forced to learn how to counter attacks that they were simply tanking the damage on easier difficulties

Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Timesplitters

Something being tedious does not make it difficult you casual soulstoddler niggers.
It just makes it boring.

The problem is not raising the health/dmg of the mobs, the problem is just doing that without adding anything else.

Fighting damage sponges is not fun. If the devs wants to add a hard mode, they need to add new moves, enemy compositions or even new mobs to keep the player engaged. Just adding more health and damage is boring and bring nothing new to the game at all.
It gets even worse when the devs decide to lock the hardest mode behind a playthrough completion like FF16 and other games did.

KH2.

just make the enemies faster and attack more often instead :) also impose time limits on segments of the game so trophy autists have a meltdown.
there problem solved I just saved gaming

/thread

/thread

the player may be forced to learn how to counter attacks

So a higher difficulty mode decreases the number of available strategies and discourages player creativity, mandating that everyone adopt the same developer-imposed playstyle? Shouldn't it be the opposite?

Star Renegades changes mechanics with each increased difficulty.

The solution is the reverse of this. High-risk, high reward combat where both you and your enemies deal increased damage.

blatant samefagging

I think you're the one looking at it way too simply. If a boss takes 3 hits to kill and it takes 4 hits to kill me, I can tank each attack and still win so long as I don't miss an opportunity to deal damage. If it takes 5 hits to kill then I only need to avoid one attack. 6 hits and 3 to kill me and now it's starting to sound a bit more fair. Time to kill vs. time it takes for the enemy to attack is of course the main primary factor, but changing damage and health values is a simple way to scale these without having to completely redesign each enemy. It also has the benefit of each player getting roughly the same experience with each fight, only some get more leeway than others.

What if that fight was fun for the entire hour? What if the game has several techniques and strategies that become relevant due to the fight being so dangerous and lasting too long otherwise? What if the only reason it lasts an hour is because you're only pressing the attack button mindlessly? By saying that you're only opening the idea that one single fight shouldn't instantly end with one button press.

It is always very tiresome how people leap to the worst, least charitable possibility of such an obviously variable concept, nevermind that nearly every game in existence employs it through its own normal playthrough with different enemies.

RTS games, tactical turn based games

If a game has difficulty sliders it's poorly designed

if the same strategy works then it's poorly designed
if your previous strategy was just mash attack to win and it worked then it was also poorly designed

how to fix this:
your enemy is a one hit kill, but so are you.

increase tension, difficulty and improves gameplay.

The difficulty changes in Triangle Strategy and Conquest felt very fair to me, agreed.

People who enjoy bossfights where you have to do the same thing over and over again are brain damaged troglodytes who should be publicly executed to begin with.
QTE loving soulstoddlers are the cancer killing video games.

You deal more damage by using your abilities to fullest at which point it doesn't even feel like they have more health. It's just more like it's a difficult meant for players who know to use the system to its fullest. If to you it means struggle then it's not the difficulty for you.

Valadis story probably has the single best difficulty system Ive ever seen in a video game

Metroidvania with obv backtracking due to the genre

Enemies get smarter the more you progress to make backtracking more fun, sometimes upgrading their movesets and even being newer elite versions with even crazier movesets

Difficulty alters how quickly enemies strengthen over the course of the game

Hardest difficulty just starts with instantly upgraded enemies, still gets stronger over the games runtime

This should just be the standard if devs weren't lazy. If it's too much, just make harder difficulties add more moves/better ai instead of a progression system.

Is normal difficulty poorly designed because you can use the same approaches as on easy?

Sekiro basically gives you a security blanket for your first playthrough and lets you remove it on the second. Ultimately you do need to learn your parry timings, but not getting chip damage lets you get away with more.
It can have some problems.
At higher and lower difficulties the game can essentially turn into an an entire different game because you don't need to use certain gameplay mechanics on easier difficulties or literally can't on higher difficulties.
This means that the game either isn't fun on multiple difficulties (rendering them basically obsolete) or the developers had to split their work between multiple difficulties.
And if the game can't assume that the player ever has to make use of a certain mechanic, then it can never build on it to make the gameplay more complex later, causing either deviation (since later gameplay segments can't assume that the player has mastered a mechanic at the same point on all difficulties) or simplification (since the game simply won't assume that the player can even use the mechanic)

That's narrow-sighted thinking as it can be either way depending on how well it's balanced. Good balance encourages the use of all resources and interact with all the mechanics in order to survive. Being able to tank less means the player has to come up with a solution to attacks they might have ignored on easier difficulties. You might experiment with moves you underutilized on an easier playthrough, or put more value into the consumables.

QTE loving soulstoddlers

Is this a bot post? Souls games do not have QTEs

Hitmen Absolution

Slay the Spire's 20 ascension levels are nearly all unique difficulty increases, with only a few being the enemies having more health. Things like getting less potion space, new enemy attack patterns, receiving less resources for beating enemies and receiving less healing after checkpoints, etc
Biggest flaw of that game is you can't pick them piecemeal because there are a few that are very annoying and there are many other modifiers you can make use of to individualize difficulty and variety.

I think he was going for "roll is a QTE" angle.

increase enemy count

increase health/damage

increase movement speed

decrease attack windup time

increase aim accuracy (including predicting your position based on movement direction)

the difficulties play differently

fun

Maybe the point of the game is to be fun and the difficulty options are there so different skill players can have fun and not just the idiots or the tryhards?

That has to be the cutest casual phonetoddler faggot reply I have ever gotten.
Every single thing you do is a QTE in that game you just don't get a shitty icon in your face but it's literally the same gameplay.
It's designed for the most brain damaged mouth breathing imbecile fucktards in the world.

Kid Icarus Uprising

if it virtually plays the same, i'd say yes

If it's too much, just make harder difficulties add more moves/better ai instead of a progression system.

Dev laziness is the core of it, because this would require the devs to have enough good ideas to be able to gate half of the enemy moveset and still have them be interesting.

You couldn't even read more than a sentence before leaping to nonsensical assumptions? The irony is that you would have agreed with what was said.

How would you balance something like a racing game then? This whole "its just bloat, its just AI cheating" is all just people crying because they have tiny peepee and feel bad because they wanna beat le hardest difficulty but can't or find it too frustating to go through. Just pick the fucking difficulty that suits you the best and stop crying.

By that metric anything that's not entirely turnbased and requires any factoring in of things happening around you is a QTE to you. That's retarded and I say that as someone who also hates rollslop

what are the alternatives? they dont make 3D action games anymore.

Personally, I prefer S.T.A.L.K.E.R's take on this where the master difficulty makes everyone take more damage

He just wants to control the argument by focusing on the easiest to attack examples (though I think it's a hyperbole to describe Souls gameplay like that, I bet the games he considers to have well designed difficulty scaling are much simpler and easier overall)

Not exactly solved but Mass Effect 2 put layers of protection on enemies so you had to relly on your squad powers more and potentially choose a good composition when going to missions.
The downside is that some squadmates were pretty much uselss (mostly the biotic ones).

Hitman Blood Money.

enemies not visible on map

key features like important items not visible on map

alerts take longer to switch to lower-alert status

enemies see through disguises quicker

enemies can see and hear longer distances

lockpicking takes longer

unarmed NPC's are more likely to grab a weapon off the ground and shoot at you if they know you are dangerous

you have less health

above Rookie, running raises suspicion, faster the higher the difficulty

Instead of quick time events they should make slow time events for the thinking man.

Tom Clancy games, old ones at least

Enemies go down with a single rifle bullet but so do you

All fights in Bravely Default are pretty much this. Certain attacks of the bosses have to be mitigated which would not even nearly be as dangerous on lower difficulties.

racing games don't have any strategy, you just follow the perfect line, they suck cock

Not him but you could open up challenging shortcuts with increasing difficulty that you need to use to get ahead, for one. Then as you get better at the game the maps become more interesting and dynamic, while also pushing you to learn the shortcuts because you're needing to now to win.
Then the same strategy won't work anymore because you need to rethink how you play tracks to factor in pathing the shortcuts into your route.

Yeah in every game theres a strategy and you just have to be better to win waoooow........

The irony is that you think that the world is against you when even you think that I was backing up your post.
Settle the fuck down, child.
Now you are just pretending to be retarded.
Simply stop making bossfights. Doing the same thing multiple times is inane.

It's artificial difficulty and developers being lazy.

Yeah I know. I usually just play normal mode nowadays outside specific cases like kh2 for normal/proud is for actual children.

not just the idiots or the tryhards?

But that's all gamers

So you literally lock content behind difficulties lol? This is btw why people speedrun, because the base game is too easy so they make their own rules and do all these shortcuts.

It's fine to play it but if you shit on people for not wanting to deal with hp bloat you are gay as hell

Yes and one needs easy diff and the other hard. The people like you can choose medium. Happy ending no?

The alternative is to move to a timeline where TVtroupes never got made, so maybe pseudo-intellectuals don't lambast everything they can recognize patterns in.

Make hard mode increase weapon damage across the board for both players and enemies.

control the argument by focusing on the easiest to attack examples

Pretty much every attack on difficulties increasing stats in a nutshell. Ideally it shouldn't be the only thing of course but the positive effects and outright necessity of it in many cases are heavily undervalued and it's silly to use it as a scapegoat instead of focusing on the results, but that takes more understanding of the individual games.

a strategy is a solution you come up to solve a problem, there's nothing to think about racing games, you just repeat the same shit till it's perfect, the only racing games that may have a bit of strategy have things like nitro+catch up or destroying other cars

no man you're just pretending to be retarded

Where is the cutoff for what is and isn't a QTE for you then? If having to react to things going on around you in souls games that might hurt you or benefit you is a QTE then if you actually struggled to think then you would find that more things in non-turn-based games are QTE than not.
Give me your cutoff for what a QTE is. Give me two things close to that cutoff, where one is a QTE and one isn't. Doesn't have to just be dark souls because according to you 100% of that game is QTE somehow.

Ghost of Tsushima with it's two hit kills for the player and enemies.

So you literally lock content behind difficulties lol?

Yes, obviously. This is nearly always the case. Have you never played a videogame before? You lock difficult content that is interesting but requires mechanic mastery behind completing things like tutorials and early levels, dummy.

Why don't people shitting on "hp bloat" just play on a difficulty that they are comfortable with?

telegraphed thing happens

push button to awesome

What is hard to understand about this?

Wario Land 4.

You start levels with only 1 health, but you can get it back

Enemies act the same, but there's a lot more of them

The mandatory treasures of each level often get hidden in more obscure spots

Level and boss timers are much shorter

Because their egos are hurt.

Then why are some better at the game than others?

I do. I'm saying it's fucked up when people shit on those WHO pick easier difficulties in games that do hp bloat.

Goldeneye

People could interpret that in several ways so I'm wanting to know exactly what your perspective is on this.
Give me two things close to that cutoff for you, where one is a QTE and one isn't. Doesn't have to just be dark souls.

nuh uh I dont wanna you should just know my perspective

I don't, I can't read your mind. I would like to discuss what you mean by QTE and I'd like you to provide to close examples so I can see where your cutoff is

not really, roll-to-hit mechanics have never binded the game design

I just told you, something telegraphed happens and you only have to push a single button to either avoid or counter it.
Emphasis on the single button.

You really can't think of two examples close to that cutoff, can you? You say so confidently that you know what a QTE is but you can't even think of anything that skirts the line lmao
Hit me up with actual examples close to that cutoff or don't bother replying, dumbass.

Too many posts are bringing it up as if it's supposed to be a good idea but massively inflating lethality on both sides is not nearly as smart as you think it is. If you can kill anything in 1-2 hits it entirely devalues most offensive/defensive tactics and invalidates most attacks. It rewards throwing yourself at the fight to get lucky because you only need to get it right once to move on and there is paradoxically no weight to any decisions or mistakes when they all lead to instant death anyway. It's a novelty and a gimmick.

because they're bad at games

I have given you a very clear cutoff. I don't play dogshit QTE garbage so how am I supposed to name any?
If you are too much of a mouthbreathing fucktarded gimp to understand what it means to have one(1) single button to do all the work for you I'm not sure what to say.
Stop being a consoletoddler casual bitch?

Completing a tutorial doesn't unlock new difficulty. It's literally just a tutorial.

While Slice and Dice doesn't have nearly as complex a difficulty system as StS has, the curses are quite diverse and challenging: from straight up buffs to enemy health and/or damage or their total immunity to your damage in specific scenarios – to nerfing your characters by making their abilities one-use or outright removing some, and so on. I've recently tried playing on Unfair and got a curse that spawned an additional enemy every 3th turn, so if you don't deal with most of the enemies by then, you're FUCKED.

how am I supposed to name any?

So you admit that you can't? You tell me that you know what a QTE is but you can't even name two examples that you'd say skirt the line? lmao
This is your last (You), you are a waste of digital space

Balancing your damn game

But it's always the other way around with who starts these threads. Like it's literally just me saying

it's not really hp bloat after you get better at the game

and then someone responds

fuck off retard its hp bloat if you play this you're retarded

like what

You also don't play on easy because you find it too easy and it makes your experience less enjoyable. But there are people who actually find the easy more enjoyable, so they play easy. And so there also are people who find hard more enjoyable because it fits their needs.

I've played some shooters where the devs tacked on a "hardcore" mode later on where you'd double tap everything but get killed quickly as well.
We went from having diverse amount weapon usage depending on range and ease of use to everyone dropping everything to pick up the basic bitch assault rifles. Short range ? Shotgun useless just spray. Long range? Double tap and its gone.
One shot in the head at any distances.
Okay what does it mean for the player? Now you've gotta play like a fag and clear angles super slowly with cover to not get killed. Completely killed the dynamic of a game that was a fun arcade shooter before.

That's just new game plus, it doesn't count

There is no such thing as skirting the line, it's cut and clear.
Are you too fucking stupid to think for yourself and need to be spoonfed everything even though I've told you multiple times what a QTE is?
Sit in the corner you imbecile gimp, you are no longer allowed at the adult table.

If you want a specific toggle to difficulty in a racing game then just give an option on each track for "beginner" or "advanced" where advanced has the more challenging and interesting track designed for players who have mastery over the mechanics. The track with harder turns but better shortcuts and you need to take advantage of these things because the enemy racers are better too. You beat the regular track and you unlock the advanced version as an option.
Why is this so hard for you to wrap your head around for difficulty settings for a racing game? This is very obvious.

Roll-to-hit offered a second direction for difficulty to scale in. Instead of just "damage/health go up", tougher enemies could also be harder to hit. This puts more value in attack skills and more expensive abilities that ignore roll-to-hit, like magic. Most skills were designed to effect the roll-to-hit formula. Prior to Oblivion, weapon damage was not governed by weapon skills. Weapons had fixed damage ranges and Strength provided the only damage boost. Starting with Oblivion it got turned into an overly simple formula of damage + damage + damage - enemy damage reduction.
This would be fine if leveling was linear and always meant a DPS increase like in a JRPG, but there are non-combat skills in Elder Scrolls. Leveling is based on skill growth, and difficulty scaling is based on level. In Oblivion you will eventually start to have levels that give no DPS increase as your combat skills start to plateau and you begin catching up on your utility skills. In Morrowind in this didn't matter as much, as plateauing your combat skills meant you were at a level where they were sufficient for most encounters.

valid

valid is not the point. The point is that it's boring.
Two reasons come to mind:
1) Fights become too long. Hitting someone with a sword for 5 minutes is boring. see: Oblivion, Skyrim.
2) Weapons feel weaker. A big gun feels good not just because it makes a big noise or has a big recoil animation. It feels good because the enemy dies in 1 shot. Now increase the enemy HP by 10x, and it takes 10 bullets. Now the gun feels week. Not fun.

I've not played Slice and Dice yet, I've heard it's good but you can get some runs that really do crush your balls with RNG to the point of being nearly unwinnable on harder difficulties. Would you say that's accurate or are people exaggerating?

Helldivers 2 just throws more enemies and stronger enemy types at you. Halo does the same. It's great.

track difficulty

And what's bad about just putting the more difficult tracks to the end of the game?

Game just throws bigger health pools at you

wooow

retard thinks every game is like slop souls where you infinitely scale your dogshit weapon until you stagger every boss in 1 hit and win for free

Come on zoomies
surely you remember DOOM?
Enemies change between difficulties.
You can even test it out within the first minute of the game, as the very first regular zombie marine enemy gets replaced with a shotgun marine at higher difficulties

The enemies' HP in Helldivers 2 doesn't scale at all. There are just a few stronger enemies, and more of them.

>Game just throws bigger health pools at you

No, it doesn't. I throws a greater variety of enemies at you. This complicates things for the player. It's not just health pools.

Souls doesn't have difficulty options.

I believe Ninja Gaiden does the same thing.

Damn, you’re cool

[insert joke about magic, summoning, and build guides]

That's just another saying for "more QTEs".

Because it lets devs explore with two facets of a track's core design, where in the design process you'd have an idea for a particularly nasty hairpin turn and if there is just one track and it's early in the game, it wouldn't properly reflect the natural difficulty curve at that point and that otherwise good idea on its face would have to be shelved or repurposed in a less optimal way later. With normal/advanced track design, devs can more freely explore ideas that push the envelope on things without disrupting the natural difficulty flow.
On the player side, when the expectation is set up that beating a track's default state unlocks a more challenging variant, it creates anticipation when you come across particular sections where the player will begin to imagine "I wonder if the advanced version of this track will make this straight-away different or more challenging in some way" and it gets the player looking forward to what is essentially a remixed version of the track that's waiting for them if they get good enough.
Lots of level-based games do this in other genres to great effect, like platformers having more challenging levels that gets the player thinking about how the theme of this world or level or track might get spiced up.

You can see how this is good game design, yes? How it opens up dev freedom to more creative ideas and creates anticipation and excitement in the player beyond the level they're currently playing?

Roll-to-hit was just to incentivize choosing the appropiate skill for your weapon, which is already replaced by just increasing your damage output, thus making it redundant

and more expensive abilities that ignore roll-to-hit, like magic

That makes the rolling aspect more irrelevant though

overly simple formula of damage + damage + damage - enemy damage reduction

The Morrowind formula for damage is just (Weapon Damage * Strength Modifier * Condition Modifier * Critical Hit Modifier) / Armor Reduction, please let's not be dishonest

This would be fine if leveling was linear and always meant a DPS increase like in a JRPG, but there are non-combat skills in Elder Scrolls. Leveling is based on skill growth, and difficulty scaling is based on level. In Oblivion you will eventually start to have levels that give no DPS increase as your combat skills start to plateau and you begin catching up on your utility skills. In Morrowind in this didn't matter as much, as plateauing your combat skills meant you were at a level where they were sufficient for most encounters.

None of this matters regarding rolling mechanics.

Yes. Even Souls game would benefit from higher difficulty settings because then using all the tools available wouldn't feel like cheating.

no. not even close. you're just saying random things at this point.

Are you retarded?

I'm of the opinion the game dev should make the ideal game experience be normal. I have zero qualms with people playing easy or hard, I just get annoyed when people feel the need to put others down for it. It ends up muddying if difficulties are good or not when you have people shitting on people for playing their way constantly.

This shit doesn't even apply to difficulties, everyone has heard the absolutely retarded "you didn't beat the game argument" for souls but also tons of other games. At some point, when you hear it 24/7 for years from people, mostly stupid ones, it turns from a joke to something people actually think is the correct way to think and it's the worst shit. Just play the fucking game.

You're just asking to have 3x more tracks now. And still: locking them behind a difficulty is just stupid. People want to play all the tracks regardless of their own skill level. Other games that do "remixed levels" have them as bonus content, bonus content that you find closer more you get towards the end...

I argue it's only boring if it's done poorly. The examples always brought up in the thread are the same couple of games that did it notoriously badly. If difficulty scaling is done correctly, you won't notice those issues. It can have the opposite effect, where instead of just one shotting everything it now feels like you're having proper duels with the tougher enemies. If the numbers are scaled properly, the big weapon still feels appropriately powerful and possibly more-so as it turns into your out when up against stronger opponents.

I won't say it's impossible to have an interesting game with it but it takes a lot of care and attention so it's far from the magic fix that can be dropped in people pretend it is, your examples are very much a good showcase of where it can entirely reshape the game and not necessarily for the better.
It's also very telling that people constantly cry about the "hp bloat" boogeyman as if it's completely universal and impossible to avoid. To use the shooter example, an armoured guy might take a lot of hits if you just keep using the basic assault rifle and magdump into the chest, or you can drop him fast with a headshot or a shotgun requiring more aim or positioning consideration. Which means you not only have to think more about how you approach the game and learn more about doing so, but it invites more potential mistakes (which are necessary to learn), so it all really makes you think. Two very relevant posts: (shoutouts to him fighting the gaslighting too)

Gamea are so fucking stupid for doing this. Just don't have any difficulty options. Have one difficulty option that's balanced well and you don't have the issue of locking better AI behind higher difficulties and so on.
No one has ever looked at game and decided not to buy it because it didn't have a hard mode or a journalist mode where the game played itself.

You cannot create ideal experience that fits everyone. People are different. That is why it is good to have difficulty options so like I said: everyone can have a best experience for themselves.

And the you didn't beat the game is a meme. Touch grass.

I think we all agree games should offer an appropriate challenge.

Ninja Gaiden Black does it almost perfectly, every difficulty is a new playthrough, they make the fights different, harder enemies show up earlier, and there's enemies and bosses exclusive to higher difficulties. They also change around weaopn locations (not necessarily to make it harder, for example on the hardest difficulty they make you start with all 3 basic weapons to balance out how hard the first chapter is), item drops, scarab rewards, where you get certain moves, and they raise item shop prices and limit items. It keeps things super fresh every higher difficulty playthrough.

So if there are only a couple of games that did it poorly then what games do damage sponges well?

This. Make us all die/go down fast like real people. Good thick armor feels like it's preventing a reasonable amount of blows from getting through. Stealth actually feels like a valid strategy cuz it's actually hard to win fights against 9 guys at once.

You argument is retarded because no other medium has this shit. If you can't get through a book because the language is difficult or you don't understand the themes, it's your problem. Do you realize how stupid you'd sound if you demanded simplified literature versions because you and other neanderthals are illiterate?
It is you who needs to touch some grass and stop treating art like content. You don't need to consume the latest media and it doesn't need to be for everyone. Stop engaging in shameless consumerism and you'll realize how stupid you sound.

I've only just recently started trying the higher difficulties out, but it's kinda true:
1) On Hard, you only pick one Tier4 curse. It's perfectly manageable, some of the curses are on the easier side – it's mostly something to plan around for the whole game.
2) On Unfair you have to select several curses for a total tier of 10, so it could be 2x Tier4 and 1 Tier2 curses – 4+4=10. Again, SHOULD be manageable, though I wouldn't attempt to try it myself yet, as Hard is already quite challenging to me as it is.
3) The last difficulty, Brutal, requires you to pick more/harder curses, some of which by themselves or in combinations can get pretty nasty and, yes, practically unbeatable.

Sure but now we're circling back to the problem of Difficulty being tied to enemy HP scaling.
A story gamer might be chilling on easy, and have a good time.
A hardcore gamer might want to play on hard. But it turns out hard is just a bullet sponge fest. So the "ideal" difficulty becomes boring. The normal/easy difficulty becomes too easy. Now the player loses interest in the game.

You're just asking to have 3x more tracks now.

The question was having different difficulty levels in racing games that didn't allow for the same strategy, and guess what anon? Having new tracks that are harder versions in the answer to that.

And still: locking them behind a difficulty is just stupid.

Then just have them both available, why are you stating that like it's a problem when the solution is obvious on its face?

People want to play all the tracks regardless of their own skill level.

Then you can't have different difficulty levels to begin with, now can you? If the difficulty modes weren't substantially different to each other to the point of requiring different strategies, then they wouldn't be doing their job to begin with.

Other games that do "remixed levels" have them as bonus content, bonus content that you find closer more you get towards the end...

Then unlock the alternate tracks when you beat the main game. Seriously, did you type this out and not consider this?
I feel like you entered this reply chain halfway through and were too stupid to realize that the things I typed and suggested were solutions in response to a problem that you didn't bother reading to begin with.

There's nothing to solve except maybe increasing damage further without increasing the health.

Just admit you're a shitter.

games with no health or damage
so it didn't solve anything it just made other changes. brilliant.

this is only true if you don't pass a certain threshold where it just becomes busywork to kill the same enemy.
Take a heavy combat pattern game like Zelda where enemies become absolutely non-threatening once you know how to fight them.
Shoot eye, throw bomb in its mouth but instead of doing it 3 times you do it 9 times now.

Fair enough, I'll probably try it out. I'm not a stickler for needing to 100% a game on the hardest possible setting so if there's a difficulty level that I enjoy I'll just stick with that. I think it's kind of dumb when games have difficulty settings that are that RNG-dependent but I get some people enjoy that sort of thing.

There's nothing to solve

except here's an example of how to solve it

why are you even being combative? you just had a good idea.

You argument is retarded because no other medium has this shit.

If you can't get through a book because the language is difficult or you don't understand the themes, it's your problem.

But there are books, movies and all sort of art that are like that. It's when some books tell you straight away all the plots and meanings and the other books only give you hints and challenge you to think.

What are some games that do the Zelda "second quest" with new level and enemy layouts? I think that's the best for hard mode.

Games should always be balanced around hard and scaled down for retards because they don't care anyway.

i don't understand.
You mean instead of reading Game of Thrones you can read Peter Pan?

That makes the rolling aspect more irrelevant though

It makes roll-to-hit something you take as a trade-off to not spend your resources. It also opens up creating encounters that value either magic or melee. High dodge enemies with low health are easier to kill with magic, while low dodge enemies with high health are easier to kill with melee.

The Morrowind formula for damage is just (Weapon Damage * Strength Modifier * Condition Modifier * Critical Hit Modifier) / Armor Reduction, please let's not be dishonest

That is exactly how I said the Morrowind damage formula works and you are ignoring the roll-to-hit formula that comes before it. Morrowind uses weapon skill, governing attribute, agility, and luck vs. the enemy's agility and luck. Health values stayed in fixed ranges with armor providing the majority of the damage scaling. In Oblivion this simplified agility, skill, and luck to just be extra values in the damage formula. This removed the need to value one over the other as they now all serve the same purposes and only the one with the highest weight matters.

None of this matters regarding rolling mechanics

It absolutely does matter as like I said enemy health stays in the same ranges. If were to gradually increase as you leveled up (like it does in Oblivion) then you get those damage sponge enemies you hate as you start to approach the point of the game where your DPS stops going up each level. In Morrowind this isn't a problem because cliff racers always get killed in 2 hits from your axe regardless of if you have 20 skill or 100 skill.

picrel solves this

I am not asking for a solution because we already have one. No point in asking to double the dev time just because someone is crying about hard difficulty being "artificial". People ask game to be harder, not different, or bigger.

Difficulty scaling should come in the form of enemies having unique attacks and even for some games defensive strategies so players actually have to think and counter new methods that are different and more of a challenge to regular play. Perhaps a string of attacks an enemy can do but some of them are quicker or slower which will put off the player, always being randomised to keep you guessing and on your toes as when to attack or when to back off/defend. Higher health and higher damage can be okay when combined with the above but they shouldn't be the main point of harder difficulties, alone all they do is waste players time because you're still doing the same thing just taking longer to do it

look inside

hard difficulty makes you onehit enemies

KH2FM at level 1

and they one hit you in return
a fair deal

I think it's a bit of loaded question to be asking specifically for "damage sponges" as that's what you typically want to avoid when scaling numbers, unless it's for an enemy that serves that purpose on all difficulty levels. But a good example would be the Ratchet and Clank series. These games used dynamically scaling health and damage on a per-level basis in order to adjust the game difficulty to match the player skill level. This wasn't a setting in the game options but was instead done automatically, but it was still very effective in making the game feel appropriately challenging for all players.

I don't like this because it means anything lower than maximum difficulty is essentially playing a different game

But you are always the one who gets to react first. You have infinite retries. Enemies 0.

increase health and damage

players look for path of least resistance and discover exploits

cheesing hard difficulty is easier than playing normally on normal difficulty

I play on easy mode with extreme handicaps if I don't like certain aspects of a game.

but that makes the game easier for people with good aim

I'm not saying normal is for everyone. I'm saying it's the devs ideal intended experience, and that having easy/hard to accommodate as many fans as possible is a good idea.

And im fully aware "you didn't beat the game" is a meme, I don't take it to heart and use whatever. But you are ignorant if you think people saying that constantly doesn't make some people genuinely believe it, even here. It makes people play in oddly specific ways and shit on people for doing otherwise and, even if it's a joke, happens so much that it does make people feel like they didn't actually play the game the correct way. It's retarded and I'm just tired of seeing it. What happened to being genuine, is this retarded website just an excuse to act retarded and make people feel bad about their hobbies instead of genuine conversations.

Yeah sorry I wrote my post in hard difficulty.

Resident Evil Revelations changes enemy spawns and quantity. Inferno was fun.

Once again this doesn't address the damage and health scaling directly and just brings up how if other elements are done poorly then damage scaling will also be bad.

it's the devs ideal intended experience

Intended for who? The average player.

Games are designed to be engaging, well atleast action games are typically. And it isn't engaging if the game is too easy. Or too hard. So if you're less experienced player you will have better experience on easier difficulty. And as a more experienced player on hard. This is why Elden Ring can be such a shit experience for both the very bad and good players, because there's no options.

with that kind of argument pretty much no game in existence with the exception of very few with perma death options is left standing.

game rewards skilled players

and thats a negative?

and just brings up how if other elements are done poorly then damage scaling will also be bad.

and if those other elements were done "properly" the game would be incredibly bland as well. no one wants to play perfectly balanced game unless you're a tasteless autist. you cant increase difficulty by just tinkering with parameters. challenge needs to be built into the core of the game itself.

This wasn't a setting in the game

Then it has nothing to do with the topic at hand about difficulty options that only make the game more tedious.

People ask game to be harder, not different, or bigger.

And this is how I now know for sure that you were too stupid to read the entire reply chain, where the premise of the problem that I was providing solutions to was providing a harder difficulty level for racing games that doesn't allow for the same strategy as the easier difficulty level.
Next time just say in your first reply to someone "I didn't read any of the reply chain and I don't know what you're talking about" so people won't waste their time communicating with you.

>game rewards skilled players

and thats a negative?

No but it undermines the entire point of having different difficulties in the first place. The game should reward skilled players regardless.

with that kind of argument pretty much no game in existence with the exception of very few with perma death options is left standing.

The point is that low ttk just makes the game easier not harder, because all the engagements are about remembering where to point and shoot and then the thing dies.

No you fucking retard. The enemies health doesn't change, there are bigger, stronger and more numerous enemies in both games. An AR in Halo kills grunts on Legendary just as fast as it does on Easy.

A lot of action games introduce new enemy types on higher difficulty levels, but bayonetta 1 does it best. Hard introduces new enemies, Very Hard switches off Witch time. Mastering dodge offset and blazing through very hard is pure bliss in bayo 1.

You're replying to someone who thinks that the current difficulty system is fine. That is why I am not taking your "advice". And I am not a developer, you are welcome to tell them that. But like I said I find it very unlikely that they're willing to dedicate that many resources and it's probably the whole reason why sliders are so popular. And the sliders are enough, for most. Some will whine, but such is life.

are you a bethesda developer?

That's because it's more like NG+. Introducing some of the harder enemies on the very first levels doesn't really make sense from the 1st playthrough perspective and sometimes even mess up the story because they appear before introduced.

I'd say it's completely relevant because it's doing exactly the same thing as other games where the player opts to choose the difficulty level. What you said is actually something I was hoping you'd bring up so I could lead into my next argument. How it's packaged changes how you think about it. You are predisposed to think it's lazy bad if you're made aware of the scaling values. If you don't know about it then you aren't thinking about how it's effecting gameplay, and so when a tough enemy kills you you aren't thinking about how the difficulty setting might have scaled that battle out of your favor. You're only thinking about the moment to moment action. In your mind you're thinking that enemy was tough, not that this difficulty setting is tough, which is exactly what the developers intended and how difficulty settings are supposed to function.

"You didn't beat the game" is a stupid meme but it is grasping at something real and simple: the skill ceiling will always exist and just because you beat a game doesn't mean you understand everything about it. Good games encourage chasing that skill ceiling even in replays by experimenting with the tools, not burrowing into a single strat you think works or is "honourable" so you can get to the credits purely to say you did. Both "sides" of that fence are guilty of this and even the games want you to do more than that. When people constantly talk about how Souls games have an inbuilt difficulty selection based on build and summoning that meme is what they're invoking. It's also why that method of balancing isn't actually a good idea because it arbitrarily punishes people for what they happen to enjoy in a game while shoving balance duty off.
But also who cares about what others say unless they're actively getting the game changed to negatively ruin your experience? Personally though, I've noticed those bitching about difficulty while ignoring tools in the games are the ones that are the most selfish in that regard universally.

Because it's fucking boring

Try playing Oblivion and Cyberpunk2077 on normal, and again on maximum difficulty. You'll change that opinion real fast. I can only assume you don't think it's a problem because you haven't encountered it.

requiring someone to do the same thing but more is not "difficulty' its tedium

It's the only scaling method too many games use, and it is lazy compared to having better AI and more enemy placement.

Every dev makes normal difficulties for the average player

How do you even come to this?

KH normal is for the average player? No, it's for children and even then, its variable at that (1 normal is actually pretty normal compared to the rest of the series where it's far too dumbed down)

You are assuming too much out of what both devs and players want. Do you think every player picks normal in ninja gaiden and wants the same thing? No, some want to be engaged with dealing with a tough group of enemies and dealing with them 1 by 1. Others might like to just enjoy the cool combos and aren't bothered taking hits to do the cooler combos or the ultimate technique animations. You can't just make such broad assumptions on what devs expect their player bases to want along with what levels players engage with the game itself. I don't think having no difficulties is even that bad, as it cuts the fluff and let's devs get their ideal experience to the players. Yes, it means the range of players enjoying it will be less, I don't care much for the bullshit in later souls games. But at least I have an even better idea on what the devs ideal experience is compared to having multiple difficulties and everyone fighting on which is the "way to play the game".

There's no point in asking a question and then ending the thread. Then you don't get an answer to your question.

Don't give me RPGs. For once I don't like them. And secondly it's RPG. You're supposed to lose because of bad numbers. If anything that just tells that you're playing wrong genre.

The fuck are you on about? The player looking to cheat has nothing to do with difficulty settings. Keep up, anon.

If it scales with you there is no issue. If it scales because a menu you clicked then what is the point of the difficulty settings?
Regardless of the scaling if I have to do the same thing over and over again on the same enemy because it has inflated health the devs should hang from lamp posts.
Only autists like repetition. It's dogshit gameplay.

KH normal is for the average player? No, it's for children

That's their target audience.

yeah I just think it's fine anyway

Good for you, I was replying to an anon here who didn't know how to balance a racing game around separate difficulties and couldn't be arsed even thinking about it. If that person was you then you're doubly retarded for not understanding that the premise to my solution wasn't intrinsically tied to your idea that it was a problem from the start. It was tied to the previous anon's problem.
I don't care if you think it's a problem or not, my solution was for the person who did see it as a problem. Your posts are useless "well I don't like that anyway" babble and you should cease typing if you're not saying anything.

ai can see through fog of war and has infinite resources

Thanks for proving my point.

I do somewhat see the honest intent of "you didn't beat the game". Devs aren't perfect and games are massive, there will almost always be starts that make you end up not learning a bosses entire moveset or even skipping entire sections. I guess what bothers me is, why is it a problem? I can understand being annoyed when discussions happen on good fights and some people have skewed opinions due to how they fought this or that boss, and I won't blame anyone for doing so if they are genuinely passionate about a game they love, but I feel at a point it becomes overzealous and you should just accept that they just wanted to play a different way that was offered in the game. It's honestly a tough subject, esp for souls, as those games are built around a billion different builds, many of which can feel like cheese (even ignoring summons), which is why you didn't beat the game probably got so much traction as a result.

Consistency is a skill, and there can be plenty of variables engaged over time that change what you need to do or how you do it, with said variables even necessitating you do different things entirely to offset the change. Since anon was talking about Ratchet and Clank, the obvious example is ammo making you use different guns or sticking to the wrench for some enemies to preserve ammo.

When you're discussing something with someone and they ask you "how would you do X" or "what do you think about X" it doesn't mean that they don't know or have their own opinion about it. They're asking it from you because they want to know your stance on the subject.

If you don't like getting your numbers up you don't like RPGs. However because the game has diffiulty options it can be played without the RPG elements being so dominant.

Crafting enemies where you don't get bored to death is also a skill.
I believe that bosses should not exist in video games at all, there isn't a single bossfight worth playing.
If you want actual challenge play PvP you carebear pussies instead of abusing braindead scripted fights.

Oh I know. KH overall is weird, they realized at some point that they want to target both Disney fans/kh story fans that just play to get the new story beats the game is adding to the saga and the players that ALWAYS play crit lvl 1 where every fight is 1 shot prone. It's why at some point every KH game starts with zero exp and critical mode updates because they know it's their best way to get both crowds.

Yes and I'd like to have known from the start that your stance on creative difficulty options in racing games was going to be "I don't care I don't want it and I won't even engage with anything you say because I'm a retard."

Cheating, exploiting, cheesing, cookiecutting. It's a scale. Anon has a point and you'll see if if you're being honest.
HP bloat makes the game a chore. And if the game is a chore then players would rather cheese the challenge, than spend hours grinding away at HP bars.

You're still just fixating on situations where scaling is done noticeably poorly. Adding more enemies and obstacles can also be boring if it's done without proper intent. My argument is that it's not the method that makes the difference in proper difficulty scaling but how well it's utilized by the developers. Ratchet and Clank is a perfect example of how scaling health and damage can be great. The game is highly praised for feeling like an appropriate challenge for players of all skill levels, and it doesn't lock anyone out of any content with how it achieves this. It accomplishes exactly what difficulty settings should do, which is give the same experience but scaled for the skill level of the player.

scaling is done noticeably poorly.

Scaling is always bad. You are meant to feel stronger as most games progress.
I don't play consoletoddler shit so I can't comment on that game, I will take your word for it.

damn, I wish I could be good at video games like you

You could have known that if you moved up in the reply chain. And I have a guess that you did know that and just wanted to play smart. It's not that I don't care what you say. It's that I don't see what you say as a feasible solution and neither do the developers.

Old 8/16bit action games. Their way to handle it was to add more enemies, firing more shots(that may have also moved faster), and additional attacks for bosses.

You're just admitting that you don't have a proper prospective on the topic, and that you don't understand what we mean by "scaling" as you're referring to game progression. Just don't make an argument if you have nothing constructive to argue.

I guess RPGs are not games then, and I guess there's no overlap between RPG and Action games.
You're not arguing in good faith so there's no point. Enjoy your games, whatever you play.

Why is it a bad thing that the game gives you the option to play it as an action game or RPG or something inbetween? And yes I will enjoy the things that I like thank you very much.

constructive arguments about the nuance of game design

OP's buzzword-laden shit takes being lambasted and dismissed

Who are you people?

It's not really a problem in that regard, since as you say it's an inevitability. The root of the issue and where the line actually came from ironically shares a similar story with the classic "git gud". While there's more than a few retards out there who might actually get overly upset about someone cheesing a boss (who also are ironically just as bad at the games usually), the large majority see it as just a matter of fact and know that people can and will do whatever they want in their game. At most they will crack a few jokes and encourage them to try it properly for the fun of it. The real overzealous culprits in this case have been flipped, you just have to ask who actually gets upset in the situation where their perceived victory is delegitimized (in a way that has existed forever), because the ones who enjoy the challenge get their challenge anyway and no one has to care what others say unless it actually ruins the game. It's the attitude of dare I say entitlement that surrounds such a thing, and there is a demand for shitting on the mean evil elitist try hard that says googling the instant nuke strat and using savestates to get it right kinda defeats the point, that far exceeds the supply of people who just like exploring the skill ceilings and challenge of games and hope you do too.

Farther up the reply chain is someone asking to clarify if normal playing the same as easy was bad game design, and someone sayin that bloated health is fine in games. The only post making an actual "stance" is the one that I replied to to begin with, so no, there is no way of seeing such a thing by moving farther up the reply chain from the person I replied to.
And you should still kill yourself for being an intentionally obtuse faggot who can't think of anything more engaging than "well um what if it was the other way" when doing it the other way for things like track availability is a trivial choice by the devs or "well I know that was the problem you're addressing but I don't care lol" or "well they didn't do it so what about that". Kill yourself.

The thing is with a book or film they can still be finished. I can pick up Ulysses and read through the whole thing even if I didn't understand some of the prose and completely misunderstand its themes. Same with a film.

youtube.com/watch?v=iY3Cw2lkC80

just play on easy mode

posts defending difficulty options and hp *bloat*

"no way of determining the stance"

"kill yourself faggot kill yourself"

You're pretending to be so obtuse that you believe that we have poor devs here asking for tips on game design on Anon Babble and now you're crying crocodile tears it when turns out that it was an argument and not a cry for help.

"HP bloat" is also an immensely subjective scale, for how often it's been used in this thread I'm willing to bet most have radically different views of what would constitute it and next to none of them have thought of it in regards to a specific game or how its mechanics would address it, let alone how the player's actions can work around and erase it. At this point it's just a thought-terminating cliche.

Doom enemies get more aggressive while keeping the same amount of HP on higher difficulties. At least for Eternal/TDA

I love to design my enemies AI having all cool tactics, and then I realize 99% of enemies are dogshit timer events.

lmao.

Monster hunter as series has this solved pretty well, tho it is not a literal option in menu, you can just choose to do different rank hunts.

low rank

everything is pretty slow and has low hp and damage.

high rank

monster hp and damage ramped up, but it is out done by progression by crafting new tier gear from new harder monsters, so it doesn't feel spongy, just encourages you to keep upgrading weapons and armour as part of gameplay loop. monsters gain new moves. monsters enrage more (temporal speed and damage boost, attacks get variations even further eg. dragon shoots 3 fire balls instead of just 2 in row)

master rank

basically same stuff as high rank but even MORE enrages and more aggression from monsters. more new moves.

you are always free to go back to lower tiers to play with friends. and if you do not want to use higher tier gear. you can just use your old weapons and armours from lower ranks.

Terraria is the best example of artificial difficulty. I don't know why this game gets praised so much.

But this isn't really a difficulty system but for progression. A new player can't just start doing master ranks even if they know the game inside out.

Souls haters really are losing their minds these days, Souls supremacy among all genres is making you utterly mindbroken.
Guy is literally talking about how multiplier on HP and damage is a good way to design difficulty levels, and your unhinged ass starts seething about the god genre of Souls games, when they literally do not have any difficulty setting and everyone plays on the same difficulty.
Also since when was anything tedious in a Souls game? They wouldn't be popular if they were. Every boss fight is like 3 minutes long in them. Either you or the boss dies fast.
Idiot.

Yeah these are not the same thing, one is a post early in the thread with 10 replies and is about HP bloat, not racing games. It's stupid to assume someone is the previous person far up in a reply chain and if you're not new here you typically specify such things. But again being the first guy to shit out the initial post again doesn't change how much of a fucking 2-brain-cell retard your replies were and that is why I implore you to end your life. You deserve no more replies and I will interpret any reply to this post as the last thing you do before you follow my advice.

Timesplitters 2

HP bloat. Speed bloat. It's same philosophy. Just a simple slider/variable in the game that doesn't "add anything new" which seems to be what people want. Not more difficult game, but more game.

How is this not more discussed. Ghost of Tsushima is 100% the answer.

Again, you're missing the forest for the trees. Wanting to cheat is more a sign of your low inhibitions/browness rather than difficulty.

hard difficulty

enemies have visible erections

How is it even a challenge anymore if everything dies to 2 hits?

Well I did post this.

easy difficulty

enemies put out on the first date

Fallout 4 survival mode

Dead Space (not remake). It might (might, probably not) increase enemy aggression on higher difficulties but largely they only deal more damage to (you). You might say

but anon, that just means the enemy is of the dealing more damages to you!

except here's the important part, the difference between Easy and Hard in DS isn't some huge gameplay changeup, hard just requires you to play better. Wasting resources in easy, taking bad fights, not using telekinesis, you're allowed to get away with these things on easy, on hard the game expects you to actually play the game and make the best functional use of what you got.

Enemies don't get spongier, your ammo is a little bit harder to come by so you need to land your shots, ect. The difference between DS difficulties is easily defined as "git gud" if you're taking hits on easy you're playing poorly, if you're taking hits on hard you're playing poorly. It's one of the few modern(ish) games that have good difficulty settings.

If you want to see how not to fucking do it, look at Uncharted 4, it has 1 billion difficulty settings but it's only balanced around 2 of them, Normal (easy) and Hard (Normal). At higher difficulty levels all the other gameplay elements added like rushing for melee, grappling hook, sliding around, ect are useless because you simply die from leaving cover almost instantly. It changes the gameplay drastically, from doing doofy crazy shit to explicitly becoming a bad version of Gears of War.

Good difficulty settings are balanced around the gameplay available, it's why many of the single difficulty setting games don't struggle with this problem.

pick a magazine with clearly visible 10 bullets inside

+1 ammo